this is one monkey you gotta meet

To be honest, I haven't gotten quite so excited about someone else's life for a long time. When I first glanced over the press release for “The 99th Monkey: A Spiritual Journalist’s Misadventures with Gurus, Messiahs, Sex, Psychedelics, and Other Consciousness-Raising Experiments," I basically puh-shawed (verb usage?) And then I came to. (Press-releases send me into a 30 second stupor before I am able to resume normal brain function.) I read a few sentences. And then a few more. And then I couldn't stop! Which led to this beautifully written passage that now graces the editorial department's cutting room floor:

While reading his book, my work and my co-worker’s work suffered. I couldn’t stop compulsively reading, shrieking or quoting aloud passages as I delved deeper into the jungles of this man’s ridiculously adventured life, populated by the who’s who of the modern spiritual world against such backdrops as India, Brazil and Jerusalem.

Then I got to meet the guy. And he's so unassuming! He's not arrogant or prickish or loud or any of those things you may have come to fear in a writer, if, like me, you spend some time around writers (Or gurus for that matter. I'm not referring to YOU of course.)

Come to find out, he's spent over a year in our fine, charming, cosmopolitan town and has not yet met ANYBODY!! He has friends all over the globe and a lovely wife, etc. but he's been pretty much a hermit around these parts and so I graciously offered to help him step into the limelight of the South via the alternative weekly vehicle, Style Weekly! So anyhoo, read my article HERE. And come with me to hear him read at Chop Suey at 1317 West Cary Street on April 6 at 3pm. It'll be a swingin' good time.

Here's another little gem that got the axe:

But for all of his spiritual tomfoolery, the undercurrents of “99th Monkey” are serious, historical, and even monumental. Sobel’s moment with the Dalai Lama is transcendent; his homage to Auschwitz is sacred and his quest to understand the horror instilled in him as the child of a child of concentration camp victim is key. As a chaplain at a university hospital he helped people.

jesus' lap looks so full

Like every good Jewish girl, I love Easter.

Hunting for hollow chocolate bunnies in the bushes, rainbows of jelly beans buried in plastic eggs, flourescent yellow sugar chicks laying upon their beds of plastic grass. Just like what Jesus had at the last supper. So this Easter, we went to visit my mother-in-law (whom I love dearly. this is a disclaimer for anything that comes next.) Like all good Jewish girls, I married a Baptist boy, ensuring that our son would grow up to have just as big of an identity crisis as me. Sunday, after an anarchy filled egg hunt and a cartoon about the resurrection we took our boy to the nursery with his Baptist Grandma while we headed upstairs to catch the Sermon. Sadly, the sanctuary was already filled to capacity and we had to leave. Yes, we had to miss the 13 live baptisms on the docket for the day- unlike 2 years ago when my "Sex in the City" cellphone ring added a new dimension to one man's religious induction. We could have squeezed into the adult education room with the rest of the overflow and watched the service on video, as we were invited too, but we have standards. We are not McEaster nuggets. We walked up and down the streets of Mr. Rogers Neighborhood (wishing desperately that more Jewish people would move to the South and open some coffeeshops that weren't closed on Sundays) before returning to Church to wile away our time in the Bethany Room. There, Stan, who like all good reclusive-skater-intellectual-freaky types went to a Nazarene College in Boston, read to me some of the more interesting passages from one of the many Gideon Bibles, lining the shelves.

Such as this from the book of Judges:

But Ja'el, the wife of Heber took a tent peg, and took a hammer in her hand, and went softly to him and drove the peg into his temple, till it went down into the ground, as he was lying fast asleep from weariness. So he died.

Hmph. Well. Yeah. Happy Passover ya'll!

exhaustion is a 4 letter word.

this is what the inside of my planner and the inside of my brain look like tonight at 10:58 pm:

deadlines

line edits

publications committee preschool silent auction

calendars out the wazooky

spring social scene-- a beast I tell you!!

gym (well, at least i walked in)

board meetings (wait a minute- am I a grown-up??)

taxes

law suits

collection agencies

playdates

easter eggs

birthday parties. for people who haven't reached their double digits. lots of them.

bed

laundry laundry laundry

dishes dishes dishes

life and death

returned phonecalls

all the unreturned phone calls

subsequent guilt

disturbing dreams

dead sleep

carb heavy sugar laden breakfasts

caffeine

coffee

caffeine

coffee

a lite lunch salad

parking garage

energy bar

god

please

prayer

please

17 cool kids

So I wrote the "16 under 16" piece for Style this year honoring 17 kids ((15 + twins) that have made an impact on the community. Tonight was the event and it was even more inspiring than most events with kids that are intended to be inspiring. Dr. Bill Bosher was the speaker. As a lifetime on and off resident of Henrico County I have heard this man's name and seen his big smiley white mustached, bow-tied head shot at least one million times since kinder garden. He SORT OF looks like a mix of Colonel Sanders and Santa but he was a lot funnier and friendlier and more laid back than I expected a man with that many credentials following his name to be. He said he'd known his wife since he was in seventh grade and she in sixth. He thought she was the prettiest girl in the school and she thought "this boy needs help!" = they were a perfect match.

And then came the kids. They were all so ADORABLE (not to be condescending!) and kind hearted and enormously smart and more accomplished than a lot of us much further along in our double digits. I'd had the pleasure of interviewing each of these seventeen in February and had already fallen in love with every one of them. It was neat to see them with their families, dressed up, in front of a podium, accepting their honors graciously, shyly, with pizazz, humility and just a tiny tad of tomfoolery. Their parents were teary, beaming, immensely proud and grateful to have their kids recognized and honored in this way (aren't moms and dads the wind beneath all those little wings?). I mean, we were at the Virignia Historical Soceity. CBS 6 Evening News was there. The publisher and a local news anchor (I'm sorry, never caught his name, can't remember who, but Mr. Personality) read the bios and gave the awards. It was cool to hear my words read from a stage. Maybe I'll become a speech writer. Then again, I probably won't.

And of course, during the program, I had to reflect on my own childhood and early teen years. The coulda woulda shoulda didn't oh wells what the hells. The i'm glad I did that-but not that and the if onlys and thank gods and might have beens. The fights with my mom and my defiance and sneaking out and experimentations with substances not legal for my age group and the bleached blonde hair and the occasional bad case of the F-its. And then I think about my three year old and where he'll be in those tender painful raw middle high school years fraught with potential and danger and possibility. What stages will he walk across or trip on or soar above? Will we applaud as he stands and catch him if he falls? Yes of course we will. But please God, don't let him be like me!

It's an astronaut....it's a playboy bunny....it's Dan Mathews!

He's hot. He's wild. He's gay. He's into animals. Did I mention he's hot? He's also hilarious as hell and he's coming to Barnes & Noble on St. Patrick's Day. He's best friends with Pamela Anderson and he likes to go to jail naked. He's been in a psychiatric institution in Paris, lectured at Harvard and covered himself in fake blood at KFC. "Committed: A Rabble Rouser's Memoir" is very funny, endearing, absurd and brave. I had the pleasure of speaking to Mr. Mathews on the phone for about 30 minutes last week, and not only did I laugh throughout our entire interview, I laughed after we hung up and I went to bed laughing. I woke up laughing. I laughed writing the article, and then later, reading it. THANK GOD I have a brilliant copy editor who caught the extra "T" I snuck into Mathews (altho, that's the first thing that hit me after I quit laughing). You might not think a guy who cares so much about ermines and bats and minks and rats and stuff would have such a sense of devil-may-care humour, but you'd be wrong. And the funny thing is, (IF YOU EVER FIND MY BLOG, DONT READ THIS PART, DAN) I still want to eat fried chicken and meatballs (not together) and I'm not throwing away my college friend Walker's grandfather's leather coat or my Danskos and yes, I'm one of those who would rather take a week's vacation at the IRS than look a slaughter house in the eye, but I will definitely THINK about it all differently. I will. Thanks for putting the funny back in the t00-disgusting-and-vile-to-consider, Dan. Maybe my kid will see the world differently too.

In any case, whatever side of the fur fence you sit on, you still gotta read my article in STYLE !

crusade

I have distributed posters before, for various and sundry open houses and festivals, but never with such finesse and panache as I managed today. I was a poster hanging genius! I channeled my super powers by way of my passion for the mission- the Style Weekly Fiction Contest!!! On previous poster hanging details I have been the messenger without much of a message. At least not a personal one, hitting so close to home. Now I deliver poster as if my near future depends on it- because it does. I will be reading the stories that these posters illicit and I want them to be good. I want them to be plentiful. I want my fiction cup to over-floweth.

Judging stories in the past has been a dubious pleasure. If ever YOU submitted a story, yours is not the I'm talking about. Yours was great! I'm talking about those others, the ones that made me want to peel my eyelids back, take my temperature, call the po-lice, push the button, prepare for armageddon, crawl back into the womb, play the record backwards and wait for Satan to speak.

Please, God of Posters, don't let my foray into Panera and Starbucks and the Book Room and Superstars (of course not Ukrops- it's Sunday, silly!) and Book People and BIG BOOK SALE and Barnes and Noble be for naught. Submit something; give me something good. And hear this Barnes & Noble: Even tho you're conveniently located and have a train table and make a good latte, I'm not just "some lady from Style," I am "the lady of style" and I hung my poster even tho you said I couldn't! In your face! Well, I sorta propped it up there inside of the Style rack. But still! Sock it to the man!